What’s the difference between speed reading and PhotoReading?

People are pretty much familiar with the concept of speed reading. But far fewer people have even heard of PhotoReading. That’s because speed reading is literally twice as old as PhotoReading, and you don’t have to buy a $16 book to learn how to do it.

So what’s the difference? First, a little history. Legend has it that a school teacher named Evelyn Wood observed her English teacher reading an 80-page essay in 10 minutes during her undergraduate studies in English at the University of Utah in the late 1920’s. When she asked him how he read so fast, he basically said he didn’t know – he just read speedily. She spent the next 30 years studying how to read faster, and in 1959, Wood started a company called Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, which is still a thriving business to this day. And thus, speed reading was born.

PhotoReading has a bit of a different story. According to Enzo C. over at MentalPhotography.com, an author at the Learning Strategies Corporation named Paul R. Scheele attended a subliminal dynamics course in October 1985, and invented PhotoReading a mere three months later. It’s safe to assume that PhotoReading is based on many of the principles he picked up in this course. That’s pretty much it, as far as the history of PhotoReading goes. I could make up more stuff, but that’s what Wikipedia is for.

SPEED READING

It’s basically the combination of removing inefficiencies in your current reading methods, and practicing a set of techniques to read even faster.

Remove Inefficiencies

Stop reading to yourself in your inner monologue. As long as you do this, you will only ever read silently as fast as you do out loud.

Stop back-skipping. This is when you accidentally read the same line twice in a row, or get sidetracked and have to re-read something. The key here is just to practice being present. Don’t let your mind get hung up on one idea while your eyes keep moving to the next.

Build Skills

Train yourself to read groups of words simultaneously instead of going one word at a time. In theory, you’ll eventually get to the point where you can read an entire line as if it was a single word.

Practice, practice, practice.

PHOTOREADING

This is the act of engaging your entire mind, and using a 5-step process to absorb a specific and previously decided upon piece of information from the book.

Prepare

Before you read, decide what you want to take away from the book. There are some mental exercises you do to program your mind to pick up on those things during your read.

Preview

Skim the book at a rate of about one second per page, taking in things like headers, bold text, italics, side notes, quotes, and other stand-out words and phrases. Here, you’re looking to grasp the overarching themes from the book, and find things that your brain latches on to, based on the programming you did in the previous step.

PhotoRead

Set the book in your sights such that you’re not focusing on any one part of the book, but rather you’re looking “through” it, and putting the entire spread of both pages within your field of view. Flip through the book page-by-page. You’re not reading at this point – you’re creating mental snapshots for your subconscious to recall at will.

Activate

Employ a new set of techniques to help solidify what you’ve PhotoRead into your memory. It can involve mind mapping, sleeping, or intentionally thinking of unrelated things for a set period of time.

Rapid Read

This is basically speed reading after letting your brain percolate for a while. You’re basically going back through the book to pick up anything you may have missed the first time. By now, you’ve got a pretty good lay of the land. You know where to find the things you decided in Step 1 that you really wanted to pull from the book. You find those places and re-read through them with laser focus. But, since all the images have been “snapshotted” into our brain, you have a sense of familiarity, allowing you to easily glide through the reading process. At the end of this step, you will have accomplished what you set out to do in Step 1.

Basically, your takeaway here is that you should only PhotoRead a linear story book if you want everything to be spoiled in the first 2 minutes. Or here’s a better idea: don’t PhotoRead linear story books. I feel like both skills are good to have for different reasons, but if I had to pick one, I would still pick both. Because you’re not the boss of me.

These results clearly indicate that there is no benefit to using the PhotoReading technique. The extremely rapid reading rates claimed by PhotoReaders were not observed;

Moreover, the PhotoReading expert showed an increase in reading time with the PhotoReading technique in comparison to normal reading. This increase in reading time was accompanied by a decrease in text comprehension.

I’ve got to say, I trust that the scientific method was used in this study, and that it was used properly. That being said, I think their idea of what Photoreading is supposed to be was a little skewed. Remember that the first step is to decide what you want to take away from the book. That means that you’re also deciding what you’re not interested in retaining. While Paul Scheele may have touted it as some kind of unrealistically miraculous reading method, you’ve got to look at it for what it is: an efficient and effective way to absorb from a book what you want to absorb, in a way that will make it stick.

Some people are Photoreading without calling it Photoreading. James Swanwick recently spoke with Dave Asprey on his podcast, The Bulletproof Executive, about how he reads a book a day. When Dave asked him how he does it, James basically described Photoreading.

You might not memorize every word on every page after glancing through the book a few times and drawing some mind maps. But if you want to knock out a 300-page book in 24 hours and retain the parts that are most important to you (and let’s face it, that’s all we really ever retain anyway), Photoreading might be worth a try. So, take everything with a grain of salt–not a freaking handful.